When you write a blog post on your website, that article immediately goes out to your followers. But the content also remains on the website for others to find via search engines or social media. Each time somebody reads your content, there’s the potential to serve them an ad, product for purchase, or affiliate link (many links in this post are affiliate links). Each set of eyeballs that read your content carry the potential for passive income.
What I did: I first identified my favorite places in the world to live: San Francisco, Honolulu, Paris, Amsterdam, New York City, and Lake Tahoe. I then looked up the median rent and housing prices for each city. Then I factored in private education costs for two kids to be conservative given I may not have two kids and public schools are often good enough. After calculating all vital costs, I then did a self-assessment of how happy I was making $50,000, $100,000, $150,000, $200,000, $250,000, $350,000, $500,000, and $750,000. I decided working 20 hours a week making $200,000 a year is the best income balance for maximum happiness.
Viral marketing is more about reaching out and touching the passion point of your consumer so that the passion drives the message and the message continues to reach the masses without assistance from you. You can orchestrate a viral campaign, but very seldom are viral campaigns that are orchestrated as successful as those that are just driven by the passion of a consumer. For it to reach a level of success your consumer must feel they have a personal stake and investment in the success of your campaign.
Before the challenge, ALS was known to much fewer people. But things changed after the challenge, and it was everywhere on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, news, events, etc. The reason was the visibility created by the campaign. You need to create awareness about your brand through various marketing channels. People will prefer to buy from you only if they know about you.

To make the Viral Cycle Time as short as possible, we can apply the same thought process that we use in Building a Sales and Marketing Machine, where we look at what are the customers motivations and negative reactions as they flow through the viral cycle. For example, when I reach the stage where I have to enter my friends addresses, I will not bother to do very many if I have to look them up in another program, and copy and paste them one-by-one into the browser. You can solve this problem by providing me with Facebook Connect integration to invite my Facebook friends, and an adapter to import my email contacts. (Check out the “Share This” button on the left side of this post as an example of how this can be done.) Getting at email contacts is easy with web mail clients like GMail, etc. – but harder with Outlook. However viral products like LinkedIn have created Outlook adapters that you can download. It is also feasible to get at that information via Outlook Web Access (OWA) provided you can deal with the security concerns.You should also be looking for ways to encourage customers to invite people at various junctures in their use of the application. And of course, you should be asking yourself the question: is the value proposition of your product really that compelling that your customers will want to share it with others? Another great way to increase virality is to incent customers with a reward for every customer they successfully convert. Since this can result in an individual feeling guilty that they are making money off their friends, the best way to do this is to also provide the friend that is receiving the invitation with an equal incentive. Now your customer will feel like they are doing their friends a favor.

In January 2018, I missed my chance of raising the rent on my new incoming tenants because it didn't come to mind until very late in the interview process. I didn't write about my previous tenant's sudden decision to move out in December 2017 after 1.5 years, because they provided a relatively seamless transition by introducing their longtime friends to replace them. I didn't miss a month of rent and didn't have to do any marketing, so I felt I'd just keep the rent the same.
The first time I did affiliate marketing was way back in the day on my architecture exam website. I connected with a company that sold practice exams, which gave me $22 for every person who bought one of their exams via my site. Since then, I’ve generated over $250,000 simply by recommending that product alone. Again, this is a product that was not mine, but one that has still been helpful to my audience. This was all done with thousands of visitors a month. Not millions, or even hundreds of thousands.
A short study of this web site reveals that a hugely important factor for success in startup companies is finding ways to acquire customers at a low cost. In the Business Models section, we looked at the perfect business model: Viral customer acquisition with good monetization. However viral growth turns out to be an elusive goal, and only a very small number of companies actually achieve true viral growth.
To start Viral Marketing, companies use ‘seeding’. A seed is planted, it grows, creates new fruit with seeds that subsequently distribute its seeds. That means that a marketing campaign gets a nudge in the right direction; people are actively informed about the new campaign via social media. They’re stimulated to watch the expression. That gives the originator influence over the direction and the result of the viral marketing campaign.
I’ve been researching a path to financial independence, and the wealth of knowledge here is amazing, but at times overwhelming. I’m honestly not quite sure where to start. Whether it be paying off debt (which I’ve always heard is priority 1), or sinking money into realtyshares or CDs for growth. I’d love to generate a passive income (in a few years time) to supplement some of my day job to have time to spend with my little one during her golden childhood years, but not sure if there’s even a right order to go about it.
They also launched an incredible Retirement Planning Calculator that pulls in real data from your linked accounts to run a Monte Carlo simulation model to output the most likely results of your financial future. I strongly suggest you run your own numbers, play around with the income and expense variables, and see how you stack up. It’s all free and easy to use.
Blogging is still going to take work starting out. That path to $5,000 a month didn’t happen overnight but just like real estate development, it build up an asset that now creates constant cash flow whether I work or not. I get over 30,000 visitors a month from Google search rankings, rankings that will continue to send traffic even if I take a little time off.
A new energy drink company, for example, could create an Internet video featuring a person who consumes the energy drink before performing a seemingly impossible bicycle jump. If the video is made to look real, it may encourage people who see it to share it with others. After the video receives enough views, the company could reveal its true purpose, convincing its viewers to seek out more information about the drink without ever using a traditional advertisement.
Investing is arguably the easiest way to make passive income. The problem is most investments sound good in theory but don’t work out so well in practice. And if you don’t have much experience or access to capital, let alone the time to work it all out, it can seem more or less impossible. However, there is one smart way to invest that just might work. Continue reading >
To give you a preview of this post, what you will learn is that there are two key parameters that drive how viral growth happens, the Viral Coefficient, and the Viral Cycle Time. To fully illustrate the arguments, I have included two spreadsheet models (embedded) that you can play with interactively to see how viral growth works. There is a risk with this level of depth, that some readers will find this too technical, and if you find yourself reacting that way, may I recommend that you jump straight to the conclusion, which is under the heading Lessons Learned towards the bottom of the article.
Almost all of these ideas require starting a personal blog or website. But the great thing about that is that it's incredibly cheap to do. We recommend using Bluehost to get started. You get a free domain name and hosting starts at just $2.95 per month - a deal that you won't find many other places online! You can afford that to start building a passive income stream.
Based on my initial experience of passive income, I feel real that real estate is best vehicle to build long-term investment. I live in Los Angeles and was able to cash flow my first rental property. What are you thoughts about starting out to build a passive income portfolio? I have utilized Lendingclub, online savings, and a small dividend/bond portfolio.
The reason to make use or virality, the ease in spreading and sharing, is however a double-edged sword. We cannot forget that in this type of campaign, a large part of the control falls into the hands of the users, and we risk the message being misinterpreted or parodied. On the other hand, a successful viral campaign can work miracles for your brand’s results.